


Welcome Home

by black_ink_tide



Series: Such Great Heights / Brother!Anders [3]
Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-07-20
Updated: 2011-08-12
Packaged: 2017-10-21 14:24:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 17,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/226185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/black_ink_tide/pseuds/black_ink_tide
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for k-meme.<br/>Anders meets his family again with Hawke in tow.</p><p>Sequel to 'Such Great Heights' and 'We Will Become Silhouettes'</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Satinalia.

“Well, that _is_ fetching.”

Anders rolled to the left, setting the mug of wine down on his nightstand beside the stack of books then lay against the pillows, folding his hands behind his head and stretching his long legs, luxuriating. He had fought against the relative extravagance of an actual feather-bed, but at times like this… he was glad he let Hawke talk him into it.

He had immediately stripped out of his coat and boots when they came home. Hawke had locked the door that separated their bedroom from the clinic. The door itself was well hidden from the clinic’s side. Here, they were safe. They were together. While she had stepped behind the screen where they kept a small basin to change, he undressed further, pouring a generous mug of wine in the spirit of the indulgent holiday.

Now he was wearing just a light pair of linen pants and she was…

“Turn around. I want to see all of you.” He was smiling, genuinely appreciating the view, but Hawke fidgeted awkwardly, standing at the foot of their bed.

She scrunched her nose, “You don’t think it’s a bit… much?”

“Ha! I do!”

She folded her arms in front of her chest, much of which was exposed in the loose billows of purple fabric that floated from her shoulders to pool at her belly. A Satinalia gift from Isabela, who had informed her that her wardrobe was sorely lacking in anything that might clearly identify her as a female… or at any rate, one of sexual maturity.

“Stop it,” she chided, looking down at her flat chest. She had wanted to see what the thing looked like on. She was not impressed.

“I like it. I think you’re probably supposed to wear a band or something under it, but…” he

“No, really, you think?” she smiled and dropped her arms, exposing her nipples which were clearly visible, and even more clearly hard, through the sheer fabric of the gauzy top, “You don’t think I should go out like this? ‘Hey, Kirkwall, check out my nips!’”

He let his head fall back, laughing, “It’d be an interesting strategy. Not one you’re tried before.”

“Hmm…” she looked down at herself, adjusting the fabric, “I could stun bandits with the smallest rack they’ve ever seen.”

“Hey,” he said, not laughing now, “I love that rack.”

“A rack so tiny you couldn’t even hang a small hat off it.”

“Come here.”

“I don’t even own a breast band--”

“Marian!” he chuckled, exasperated but happy, “Come. Here.”

She obliged him, crawling onto the bed, over his legs. He brushed hair from her face, wiping a smudge of wayward black kohl from her temple with his thumb, then set to a serious perusal of her face, so dear to him his breath hitched.

“Your tits are beautiful, kid.”

“Such poetry, Teo…”

He grinned, “I try.”

She kissed him, and he tasted the berry stain she had used to color her lips a rich rosy plum color. She had looked radiant tonight at Aveline and Donnic’s party. Polished in a way she normally didn’t bother with. He loved the way she looked messy hair, bitten nails, bloodstains and all… but seeing her like that… it was all he could do all night not to pull her away from the group and push her against a wall somewhere and just take her.

She kissed a sweet trail from his lips to his ear, “I have a present for you,” she purred.

He moaned expectantly, feeling her shift one of her thighs between his own. He growled, “What kind of present?”

She leaned over to her side of the bed and pulled a small box from underneath a pile of papers that littered the small table.

“Oh. An actual gift? I thought we weren’t getting… I…” she tried to sit, “Marian, I didn’t--”

“I didn’t spend any coin on it, don’t worry. It’s something I’ve had for a while. I want you to have it.”

She held the box out to him, and he took at as she rolled off of him, curling against his side while he opened the lid.

Inside was a small silver hoop, polished recently to a fine sheen and etched with a single feather on the inside of the curve.

“Marian--”

“It was Da’s. Do you remember it?”

Of course he did. Malcolm Hawke had worn a silver hoop in his ear for as long as Anders could remember knowing him. He remembered standing beside the man, not long after he had brought him into his home and seeing the blue sky flashing in the metal, the reflection mirroring the color of his eyes; Hawke eyes.

As she reached over and picked up his wine, holding the mug between both of her hands and sipping, he picked up the hoop between his fingers and turned it in the light, examining the feather that was etched like an inscription with such delicate precision, “This is new.”

“I did it.”

The same feather was etched on the hilt of her dagger, which had belonged to her father and his father before him. That blade was the only possession Malcolm Hawke managed to keep, hidden, during all his years in the Circle. It was her most prized possession, and it hardly ever left her person.

“Here, put it on. It’s clean, I promise.”

He handed her the box and sat more upright, fitting the hoop into the piercing in his ear that had never closed. He didn’t need a mirror, and the ease with which the muscle memory returned was comforting… he remembered when he had worn an earring, happier times, times at home, with Marian and Malcolm and the rest of their family. Times with Karl… getting dressed together in the morning darkness before dawn.

He hadn’t worn one in years, “Thank you.”

“It looks great,” she said, kissing his shoulder, “I’m very talented, you know. Look at that craftsmanship.”

“You…” he swallowed, then cleared his throat, which had suddenly tightened, “you have another potential career path; The Jeweler of Kirkwall.”

“I like that,” she set the wine down and kissed his cheek then rolled quickly back into his lap.

“I feel bad… I didn’t get you a present.”

“Hmm…” she pushed at the loose fabric on her shoulders until it slid free, falling over her arms and fluttering away from her body, leaving her completely bare from the waist up, wearing only a very small pair of small clothes, “I can think of a couple of ways you can make it up to me…”

“Oh yeah?” he reached for her, sliding his hands lightly up along her sides, “Such as?”

Beaming with bawdy amusement, she lifted her hand to her mouth, two fingers splayed in a V shape against her mouth and she gestured rudely, tongue curling between her fingers in an experienced motion that made a hard knot tighten in his belly.

“You are so _vulgar_!” he rolled her over, pinning her beneath him, and as she adjusted her arms which had been temporarily trapped under the twisting purple fabric of Isabela’s gift. She cooed, “Yeah, but you love it.”

“I do. Very much.”

He started kissing down along the soft dip of her belly, feeling her laugh, her beloved, vulgar fingers combing through his loose hair, “Happy Satinalia, Teo.”

“Happy Satinalia, Marian,” he whispered back into the crease of her thigh.


	2. The Clinic.

“Well hold still, Albert, and it won’t hurt as much!”

Hawke was nearing the end of her tether. Albert, a heavyset, heavily mustachioed man who was no stranger to bleary mornings in the clinic, had enjoyed the holiday a bit too much.

He had come to them this morning with shards of broken pottery, glass, and thin bits of metal embedded in his side. Additionally, there was an irritated looking oil burn across the swell of his belly that had only made matters worse. The injuries were not life threatening. Nothing was punctured or broken internally and after a quick assessment, Anders had set Hawke to the painstaking task of removing the shards and shrapnel from Albert’s skin with a thin pair of forceps and a bottle of alcohol and a healing salve. She had gladly offered to stay in the clinic and help today… but Maker Albert was worse than a child.

“I’m sorry, missus…” he sighed, sounding near tears and, she suspected, still drunk. “It hurts is all. Can’t he--”

She blew her bangs off of her sweaty forehead with a huff and pointed the bloodied forceps at him, “Do you see Anders? Over there? He’s healing a baby… a sick bloody baby! Do you really want me to tear him away from saving a _baby_ to pick out your splinters?”

She knew that’s exactly what he wanted. But he couldn’t admit it. Not now. “Poor little guy,” Albert said gruffly, turning his face forward again.

Anders had been working over the baby for quite a while now… maybe three hours without a break. She could see the strain in the column of his neck, the sheen of sweat, the stubborn set of his jaw as his teeth ground together.

She had to force herself to look away from him.

“How did you do this?” she pulled out a particularly large bit of terracotta and he jerked away from her. Fresh blood oozed out of the wound and she pressed a pad against it.

“I rolled out of bed.”

“Oh yeah?”

“And out a window… after that.”

“I see.”

“Fell on a lantern. And my wife’s pots.”

“Pity, that.”

“All the pots. Oh, she’s going to be a terror when she finds out. Is the baby going to be all right?”

“Absolutely,” she grunted, then laid a hand on his belly, avoiding the burn, “Do you want to take a break?”

“Maker, yes!” he said.

“Yeah. Me too,” she wiped at her face with her sleeve and rose; “I’ll bring you some water. Lie down a minute if you can… maybe lay on the other side, yeah?”

She left him there and went to the basin to wash her hands, following them with a rinse of clear alcohol to disinfect. She poured a mug of drinking water and took it to Albert who had managed to fall asleep with his back against the wall, sitting on the examination table. Just as well, she thought, sipping the water.

She started towards Anders just as he lifted the baby from the table, resting him against his shoulder. Alert black eyes peered at her as the baby gummed his collar happily.

“All right then?” she put a hand against Anders’ back and felt his body trembling with exhaustion. He looked at her, pale but happy, patting the baby’s small sturdy back, “Obstructed bowel. Nasty business… but Calvin here is a tough guy.”

Calvin’s mother came forward, arms outstretched and focused only on her baby. Anders shifted him to her carefully, accepting her thanks but nothing more.

“Okay, sit down,” Hawke took his arm and directed him to a chair. Seated, she gave him her water and he drank greedily. She watched his throat bob as he swallowed.

“Fuck, I’m knackered. Is it even midday yet?”

“Almost…” she pulled his hair loose from its tie and combed her fingers through it before pulling it back again and retying it neatly, “You need to take a break.”

“There’s a line--”

“You’re no good to them if you pass out. You know that, right? I can hardly cope with Drunk Albert’s pottery collection over there. I can’t do shit for another obstructed bowel if one walks in.”

“Let’s hope another one doesn’t,” he shivered, then jutted his chin towards Albert, “How’s that going by the way? You haven’t killed him have you? He looks horrible.”

She turned and looked at the sleeping man, his belly shiny with salve and inflamed, “No. Not yet. We’re taking a break. Because when people get tired they take _breaks_.”

When she turned back, Anders was tucking a vial of lyrium back into the lining of his coat.

“Hey--”

He winked at her and stood, taking her by the arms and kissing her. She tasted the lyrium and it sent a not unpleasant thrill to her core, “Maybe later, kid.”

In battle, Anders followed her. There, he was the one reaching for her, asking her to slow down, to be more cautious… but she was _impulsive_. She rushed in headlong. It had been a working system this long, largely thanks to his presence there to patch her up again when her impulsive decisions left her broken and battered. In here, though… this was his battlefield. He drove in; shoulder down and hard against the fray caring an ever apparent fuck all to the battle scars he accumulated along the way. _Impulsive_.

And while those forays into Kirkwall kept the coffers full, bellies satisfied and the necessary supplies stocked… this was the work that kept his soul, divided thing that it was, content. She understood the feeling. She just wished she could return the favor and patch him up again.

She stretched, pausing to crack her back before returning to Albert. She watched Anders walk toward the front of the clinic, checking in on the few patients that waited for his attention, most of them seated against the walls, their faces lighting as he approached.

One man stood. He was taller even than Anders which is what first drew her attention to him. She hardly ever saw anyone taller than Anders, especially in Darktown. He was broad-chested with a shock of red hair and heavily bearded. She didn’t know him yet there was something familiar about him. She couldn’t put her finger on why or how.

She was about to address Albert when she saw Anders stop.

She thought for a moment that he might attack. His stance was rigid, legs braced and his hand held at his side fingers curled reflexively for a staff he did not hold. She reached for the blade at her hip and waited. Anders would make the first move if there was going to be violence here, in the clinic. But she could help. This was the kind of battle she knew how to fight.

Anders’ eyes were locked on the redheaded man.

She felt the hilt of the dagger warm against her palm.

“Minęło wiele lat, brata.”

His voice was rough but warm. He spoke an Anders dialect, and though she had an ear for language… she knew only a few words, random snatches of phrases. She shifted her weight slightly. Though he was armed, he made no move toward his weapon, a crude sword on his back. The man looked down his long nose at Anders and spoke again; one word, and she felt the air knocked out of her lungs.

“Teodor.”


	3. Let The River In.

It wasn’t until after they’d slipped that she understood the instability of the little world they’d built together; They had danced on something as fine and as delicate as a spider’s silk. Unbreakable, yes, but Maker the edge was so fine.

“No. I’m not going!”

She bit the lining of her cheek. Night had fallen and the heat of the day had seeped into the soil around them, releasing damp fetid steam into an enclosed space. She couldn't breathe. He paced, and she was suddenly aware of just how small the room was. He had never been good at sitting still. He had never been good at being in small, confined spaces.

And now they lived in an underground room barely big enough for a bed. It was wrong.

He needed to get out. To move. Why was he denying it? She could see the tension in the muscles of his legs, energy unspent that coursed river-strong, currents of blood and power, always moving towards his heart. He was trapped by something here. It was a good time for it. Leaving the city would be good… and he could possibly get closure with his family before it was too late. His father was long gone, but he could get closure with his mother... she understood the value of that better than anyone.

“I think you should go.”

“Hawke.”

It was a warning. Hard. A reminder of who they were outside of this room. He loomed, thin and strong; she could all but hear the pounding rush of white-water in those long limbs.

“He came all this way. On foot. He’s your brother--”

He was on her, slamming into her with enough force that she let out a startled yelp. Pinned between him and the wall as he pushed, hot, hard, as if he could break through, break through her, through the walls, through the earth.

“He is _not_ my family,” he growled. There was a mad edge to his voice. His eyes. She felt fear for the first time in a long time. There was more than just Anders here in the room with her.

It was easy to forget that sometimes.

It was easy until she heard him.

Justice rattled the bars.

His hands were vice-locked around her wrists, holding them beside her face, and he did not look at her.

She felt rather than saw the cracks, and she knew that if he looked at her… she would see blue in his eyes.

“Breathe,” she said, exhaling against his neck. His grip on her wrists tightened.

“It’s my decision.”

“Your mother is dying, Anders. You won’t get another chance.”

His breath was jagged against her, his shoulders shuddering with the strain of holding her, of pushing, trying too hard to keep containing all of it.

She wondered then how much value Justice really placed on Anders, on the man and the body they shared. If he was so careless with him… pushing him like this. She felt pain in his skin, like a burn, radiating heat.

Justice did not want him to go.

“Why?” fear fell away, swiftly replaced by anger.

“Why what?”

“Why don’t you want him to go? It’s his family… his mother.”

“She gave her son to them,” his voice reverberated inside her chest. His head bumped against hers, a clumsy gesture, “They _fear_ and _hate_ what he is. The Hawkes were his family. Thekla. You.”

“But not his blood.”

“Ahh,” a dismissive sigh, and his body shifted, as he seemed to hesitate, trying to make sense out of it, “What does that matter, Hawke? We have to stay here. We can do good here. If we go, people here will suffer--”

“They suffer here anyway.”

He snarled, his head jerking away from her and she was released, lungs expanding.

He walked to the door in three long strides and was gone, glowing and hot and angry, taking all the light in the world with him.

She rubbed her wrists, ears ringing in the silence.

She fought because she had seen something in Anders’ face -- as his brother spoke, and he watched him, really listened to him… she saw it in his face; something that she had seen a long time ago, when he was still a boy. Long before Justice was a part of their life. A longing for something he never spoke about. Something unnamed. She saw it in an unguarded second.

She undressed and crawled into bed, the sheets feeling clammy against her skin.

He returned sometime before dawn, his clothes smelling of clean wet air.

He did not speak to her, but stripped and got into bed behind her, curling the length of his long body against her. She inhaled deeply, testing the air. Only Anders. Not Justice. But she could tell by the hands anyway, a tentative palm sliding along her flank.

When she did not pull away from him, he buried his face in the curve of her neck, his voice breaking, “I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”

“I’m fine.”

“The times you say, ‘I’m fine,’ are the only times I know for certain that you’re not…”

She didn’t turn toward him, but lifted her wrist in the darkness. His fingers closed gently around her, and he felt the bruise.

“Fuck.”

“Where did you go?”

“I…” he swallowed, “I went to talk to Jeorek.”

“You… you did?”

His brother, after speaking to them (well, mostly to Anders given the language barrier) had left the clinic. He was polite, and his eyes were kind, dark blue and set in a face that revealed more resemblance to Anders the longer she looked at it. Their bones were the same, but his skin was more weathered and heavily freckled. He spent his life outdoors, and she wondered if Anders would have as well, had he not been a mage, had he not been different.

Jeorek. Anders’ younger brother. He was sleeping somewhere in Lowtown, which sounded unpleasant. He had refused the lodging Hawke offered at the estate. He had looked bashful even, holding up his wide calloused hands and blushing to his ears as Anders tersely translated her offer to him.

“I needed to be outside anyway,” Anders' lips were soft against her shoulder blade, “I needed to… talk. To find out why he…” he hesitated, “Do you want me to heal this?”

“I don’t mind. Sure.”

He focused a delicate amount of magic into the skin his hands had marked.

“I haven’t thought about him for a long time. He was so little when I… when I left.”

She knew the story, abstract as it was, always told as if it had happened to someone else. He had presented later in life than most. He had a relatively happy childhood before that, as a normal child.

Unfortunately, what that meant was that the new magic over which he had little to no control over was very powerful. Dangerous. He had started a fire. It was an accident, but the family’s barn burned all the same, orange against a blue night sky. His parents had voluntarily given him up to the templars without hesitation that night. He ran, terrified, into the darkness and didn’t stop running.

He was ten years old.

He would travel alone for the next two years of his life, scavenging food, stealing and hiding until he eventually ended up in a muddy pit in Lothering.

“It was good, talking to him. He has a wife. And a son. Another one on the way. They raise goats.”

He healed her other bruise, and she twisted at the waist to give him better access.

She saw his face in the glowing light of his hands.

She kissed his fingers as he worked, and his eyes lit on her face, dark. Her back was still to him, her ass bare and nestled against him, the soft curve of his balls, his half hard cock pressed against the demure cleft of her buttocks. They were both strung with unshed adrenaline, and as he finished healing, she rolled her hips. His jaw fell.

“Ahh…”

She turned from him, offering her neck and shoulder. His mouth descended on her, hot, as his arm came around her, holding one breast in the palm of his hand, possessively. She pushed back and he forward, circling his hips, squeezing her in his hand.

“ _...please_ ,” she sighed.

He propped his weight on his other arm and lifted her thigh, opening her, pausing to run his thumb along her slit, spreading slippery wetness along her lips, circling inside of her just a fraction with his thumb. With the same hand, he stroked himself, three pumps with a tight fist, spreading her scent and her slickness on his own overheated flesh before aligning with her and pushing in.

On their sides, the tempo was slow and steady, but she could feel his heart hammering against her spine. He was so close. He held her belly as he thrust shallowly, and she felt the slow coil wind inside, beneath his hand, deep under his wet fingers. It was a lazy climax that unspooled from her core out to the rest of her body and lingered, gentle spasms deep inside that tightened her around him. He grunted, coming inside of her, clutching her close to him as his body finally relaxed, satisfied, sated.

“I want to see them,” he said into her hair, “will you come with me?”

“Of course I will,” she squeezed his forearm, feeling muscle and bone, stroking and smoothing the light hair, “What about Justice?”

He stiffened slightly, “It’s fine.”

“When you say that, I know it’s not true.”

“I’ll… owe him.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Marian…” he yawned against her skin, pulling her in even closer, “you feel so good.”

“What will you owe him?”

He was already asleep.


	4. Roll Away Your Stone.

Preparations took longer than she had anticipated. But it was in was in being so thorough that Anders would be able to walk away from the clinic in Kirkwall with some semblance of peace of mind, and so, it was worth it.

They knew an apostate healer and they had approached her together. Amalia. As tall as a man with dark olive skin, honey-colored cat eyes, and a thick plait of black hair down her back, she was beautiful but far from meek. She had become an active figure in the underground movement over the last year, and had shown a tremendous aptitude not only for healing, but leading people. She was as eager to help as she was to have a place to exercise her abilities.

Anders had been working with her in the clinic every day for the last two weeks. Having another mage there who could see inside patients the way that he could had lightened the load, and he wasn’t nearly as exhausted at the end of each day. Hawke hoped that he would allow Amalia to stay on after he returned.

Amalia wasn’t the only new assistance in the clinic.

Jeorek came each day, waiting patiently outside the doors before she or Anders opened them. He had no great experience healing people, but he did have abundant experience dealing with the broken legs, infected wounds and births of his goats… and, Hawke was quick to point out, people and goats really weren’t all the different when one of their legs was broken or they had an eye full of pus. She couldn’t attest to the birthing personally… but still.

While Anders worked closely with Amalia, Hawke directed Jeorek. Anders was there to translate as needed, but he was often too busy to do much with them. Hawke picked up more Anders words each day, surprisingly quickly, and her accent was, as Jeorek informed her in Anders, decent.

She wasted no time in showing him how to properly clean his hands, a procedure that had been passed down to both Anders and Hawke by Malcolm long ago. He was good with difficult patients, his large size imposing, but it was the tenderness in his touch that reminded Hawke of Anders most. She wondered what their parents were really like, if their father had been the same way… capable of such surprising tenderness and such brutal force.

As the days wound down, it was common to find Hawke and Jeorek sitting together beside the little fire. They would spend time scraping blood and whatever other debris had accumulated beneath their nails over the course of the day, pointing at things, clothing, anatomical features and defining them in both languages.

“Eye.”

“Mmph. Aye. Oko.”

“Oko. Boot.”

“Ah! Boot. But.”

“But! Well that’s an easy one…” she smirked, glancing at Anders who stood beside her, cleaning his own nails and listening to them. Amalia never stayed for dinner, preferring to return home. She would be staying in the clinic full time once they left, and no one begrudged her for wanting to spend time at home before then. Hawke pointed at his belt, “Belt.”

“Belt. Pas.”

“Pas.” She smirked again, and cupped Anders in the palm of her clean hand, “Cock.”

“Hey!” Anders jerked back from her, genuinely startled. She laughed, smugly, having gotten such a significant reaction.

Jeorek was laughing, looking marginally scandalized, his eyes focused on the floor between his feet. He was very fair, and when he blushed, which was often, there was no hiding it. Anders was the same but his skin was naturally a bit darker, so it wasn’t as apparent. He shook his head, his hair glinting gold in the firelight and said, “Cock. Chuj.”

“Chuj!” Hawke repeated loudly, and the blush spread to his ears, “I like that one.”

“Ona ma brudne usta,” Anders said to Jeorek.

“But you love my filthy mouth, Anders,” Hawke replied quietly, focused with sudden intensity on her nails which were already spotless.

“You learn fast, Hawke,” he chuckled, “and yes, I do.”

They had a bit of wine while Bodhan, who would often bring them dinner whenever Hawke and Anders allowed him to, fussed over a stew. Anders had things more or less settled, and they’d be ready to leave in the next few days. When he told Jeorek, a look of great relief softened the man’s face.

He was anxious to get home, to be with his wife again. Grazyna. He worried about her. Each time a pregnant woman had come into the clinic complaining of pains, he had twisted his hands nervously, brow etched with concern. In coming to find Anders, he had voluntarily missed the birth of his second child. Understandably, his thoughts lingered on home.

“Is there anything you want to see in Kirkwall before we go?” she asked him, and at his confused expression, Anders translated.

He nodded, “Tak. Jedną z rzeczy. Chciałbym zobaczyć katedra. Udział w nabożeństwie, jeśli jest to możliwe.” He spoke quietly,glancing from Anders to Hawke with eager wide eyes.

Anders’s jaw tightened at his response.

“What?”

“He wants to go to the chantry. Attend a service,” he drank his wine, “I imagine he wants to light a candle as well.”

They were polite with each other, they joked about things... but there was a cool distance in the way they regarded each other. They were brothers, but in many ways, not close at all. Strangers.

“I’ll take him,” she put a hand over his. Anders had no great love for the chantry, and in reality he was a real pillock anytime she’d taken him there on business. She wasn’t crazy about the place, but she didn’t mind it nearly as much.

“We can go tomorrow,” she said to Jeorek. He smiled, and nodded, appreciatively.

They ate, and Jeorek departed for the evening, as did Bodhan, taking his stew with him.

They closed the doors for the night.

Justice had been silent since that night. While it did please her in a way for Anders to just be Anders for so long, especially as things were changing… she never worry nagged at her regardless of how emphatically Anders assured her that nothing bad would come from the arrangement. The fact that he was being so vague really set her teeth on edge.

He been truly evasive whenever she did get him to talk but that night, after dinner, he talked more. Perhaps it was the wine.

“He wants to do something for Karl. And Bethany.”

“He… what?”

“He…” Anders shrugged, avoiding her eyes, “He _mourns_ them, Marian. He wants to do something for them.”

She felt a chill, “What kind of something?”

“He’s very protective. You know? He doesn’t understand, really… “ his voice was soft, tender even as he searched for the right words, “but he _tries_. He doesn't feel love, but he feels absence. He misses them.”

And he would say no more. His face was relaxed, his cheeks blushing faintly pink. When he took her hand and brushed a kiss against her fingers and the inside of her wrist, when she felt his lips warm and wet against her skin, she forgot about Justice. He smelled like fire smoke and herbs and meat and wine… and mint.

They made love that night, her back to his chest, his back against the headboard. Her hands were on his thighs, steadying herself as she rose and fell.

She closed her eyes tight as he mumbled breathlessly against her, sometimes in the Ferelden tongue, sometimes in Anders. “ _Maker! Moja piękna, ah, f-fuck… tak dobrze… Marian… yes…_ ”

It felt so dizzyingly good to have him all to herself.

In the morning, it was especially difficult to get out of bed, with Anders wrapped around her, content enough that he even smiled sweetly in his sleep. She managed to wake him and, after a quick and decidedly un-sweet fuck, they both ventured into the clinic.

Jeorek was outside waiting for her, his hair brushed back and tied neatly at the nape of his neck. He looked even more like Anders with his cheekbones and ears clearly visible. They have identical ears, she thought. She wondered fleetingly if people had thought the same kind of thing about her and Carver and Bethany. Sudden unexpected similarities. She shook the momentary pang of grief loose and they started walking.

She had not been inside the Chantry for a while. The incense smoke felt thick in her throat, and she fought the urge to cough. Jeorek gasped quietly beside her.

“To jest tak piękne!” he turned to her, “It is beautiful.”

“It is…” she agreed, looking up at the ominous stone figure clouded and smudged by candle smoke.

They attended a service, and while Hawke felt out of place and did not participate in the rituals or recite anything, she watched Jeorek carefully and felt almost envious of his ability to believe, the joy that he apparently found here… peace in faith.

He lit a candle and prayed. She waited uncomplainingly for him, leaning against a pillar. She was sore from the morning, and at thinking about the ache and the wetness of Anders' come warm between her thighs, she crossed her legs. _She was a wanton heathen in the house of the Maker_. The thought made her smile.

“For my father,” he explained, rising from prayer and joining her.

“What was he like?” she asked. Anders never spoke about the man in detail. Never.

Jeorek frowned, looking into the air above her head for the words, “He was… a man,” then shrugged with a laugh that sounded a bit sad, “what else could be said?”

Sebastian joined them, and spent the afternoon giving them an exhaustive tour of the chantry, genuinely elated to have someone just as excited as he was about the origin of their flagstones and the rare tomes in the library. Hawke’s mind wandered, but she kept a serenely vague smile on her face, nodded whenever Jeorek looked at her, beaming.

Sebastian treated them to a midday meal. The two men managed a very long discussion despite the lack of shared vocabulary, and parted with a hug, Jeorek enveloping Sebastian with more force than the archer had expected.

“I like him,” Jeorek said as they returned to the clinic.

“Well…” she laughed, “somebody had to eventually.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

They packed that night, and the next day bought their final supplies, and passage aboard a ship that would take them to a port in Cumberland. They would then (roughly) follow the Imperial Highway north until they reached the village just south of Weisshaupt. It was the longest journey Hawke had ever taken, and the world suddenly seemed infinitely larger than Kirkwall and Lothering and the Wounded Coast…

The world felt broader. It was a good feeling.


	5. Rabbit Heart.

It took them more than six weeks of traveling, but Jeorek assured them that they were almost there. Almost home.

It had been a long and tiring trek, to be sure, but for Marian Hawke, each step away from the City of Kirkwall felt like walking into thinner, cleaner air. It felt like walking into a dream, as if her body had simply stayed behind and her ghost had walked on without it into the Fade. It felt pure here.

Flanked by the two tall bundled figures of Anders and Jeorek, she felt safe in a way she couldn’t quite name. Not that she couldn’t handle herself if it came down to a fight… arguably she could handle herself better than they could in some respects. But it was the comfort of having them near, walking mostly in silence through the flat wide expanses of plain, crossing clean icy streams, making camp together and sleeping under the wide black sky and remembering what it was like to see the moon change with time.

Jeorek had attempted to coddle her at first, when they had started out, offering to carry her pack or lend her a hand over unstable or steep terrain. When she shrugged him off with a polite but cocky smirk leaping like an agile goat from rock to rock and pulling her own weight he had quietly nodded approval. He had not expected it from her, as she was a woman. But as they made their way north, he stopped coddling and actually would, on occasion, collide with her and, for lack of a better word, _play_. Anders would eventually call out that it was all fun and games until someone lost an eye, and the carousing would end. But it felt comforting. It made her think of Carver, and the indelicate way he had played with not only her, but Bethany as well. Maker, she missed them.

Jeorek’s admiration of her had really been solidified when he found that she had packed a generous amount of whiskey _and_ was willing to share with him.

That last night on the road, after a dinner of rabbit, she matched him drink for drink, and he had pulled her into a tight, but deeply platonic embrace as they sat beside a fire in camp. She had laughed loudly and squeezed the much taller, much broader man back. He had turned to Anders who was busy washing their plates in fire heated water to say in his own tongue, “She is a rare woman, brother, your little black bird!”

Anders had looked past his brother at Marian, whose blue eyes glinted at him over the edge of her metal mug. It was a cold night, and the mountains surrounding them were capped with snow though the valley was thankfully snowless. They each wore coats and the wet skin of his hands stung in the cold air. He wanted nothing more than to leave the dishes and go to her, pull her in tight against him, bury his hands in her thick black hair.

“She is.”

He finished and sat beside her. She promptly wrapped one thin arm around his crooked leg, hugging his thigh against her chest, her chin on his linen-wrapped knee. She offered him her whiskey and he took it gratefully, warmed from the inside out as the honey colored spirit made a quick path to his belly.

Some nights, they had told stories to pass the time. Both Anders and Marian had extensive catalogs of bawdy escapades and neither of them felt any great remorse or embarrassment in sharing… or over sharing, as the case might have been.

On their own, they had taken to occasionally telling each other about past lovers, past trysts, and while those conversations had occasionally lead to very spirited and mildly possessive nights in their bed, these conversations beside the fire tended to focus more on the outrageous, rather than the arousing.

Jeorek had only ever been with one woman, and while he was prone to laughing heartily at some of Anders’ anecdotes, he had gone nearly purple when Marian shared one experience involving herself and another archer, a girl she had met in Lothering just before the Blight. Jeorek looked positively intrigued, but also a bit as if the idea was positively mad. He had said then, very simply and without any great piety, that he had never even thought about a woman and a woman… doing _that_.

Marian had politely tried to shift the subject.

Feeling emboldened by drink and the anonymity that the empty steppe seemed to offer, he had some questions. Perfectly innocent questions. Logistics. Glancing at Anders, who had been laughing quietly throughout the exchange, she had done her best to explain how two women might going about doing _that._

The idea, however, of two men together had earned a repulsed grimace.

Anders had intentionally not shared any stories about himself and other men. He had suspected that Jeorek would feel as he did on the matter. Hawke, at his side had instinctively come to the defense, having apparently not noticed until that moment his omission of a large part of his past. He had taken her hand before she began a tirade and squeezed her fingers tightly. It wasn’t worth it to try and change his mind. He didn’t need to know.

“Sex is sex. Love is love,” she had said, with finality on the matter, squeezing his fingers back, “and cock or cunt, it’s the heart that really matters.”

Jeorek had shrugged and sputtered before swallowing hard and composing himself, blushing scarlet from hairline to chest.

This night, there were no stories. No songs. Just whiskey and fire. They were near the end of the journey. The fire crackled happy between them and Jeorek. Anders watched his younger brother, whose light eyes were trained on the dark plain, as ever, with great intensity in the direction of home.

It was a funny thought. Funny enough that a strangled laugh rumbled out of his chest.

 _Home_.

Not their bed. Not the clinic. Not Darktown. Not Lothering.

But the place where he had been born.

Marian’s head shifted against his knee, looking for a more comfortable position against the hard bone. He stroked her hair with his free hand, and felt her sigh against him, pulling tighter with her arm.

“Jeorek,” she said, and he heard in her voice the warm soft blurred edge of the drink. Joerek looked at her, smiling with familiarity. She trailed her hand along Anders’ shin absently, and spoke his language, “What’s the first thing you’ll do when you are home?”

He let his head fall back, red hair pooling around his shoulders, and said to the sky, “I will kiss my wife. And then I will meet my son.”

Anders felt her smile, “Another day of walking?”

“Yes. One more. It smells like home here. Can you smell it, brother?”

Anders had lifted his chin and pulled in cold hair through his nose, “I’m not sure. Does home smell like goats?”

Jeorek had laughed at that, and finished his whiskey in one swallow, “Yes! It does.”

They did not pitch tents that night, as it would have proved too much work with the wind. Instead they bundled up near the fire, snug under layers of blankets and coats.

Hawke felt dreamy and light, the whiskey spreading warmth from her core into her limbs and her brain. She was on the verge of sleep when she felt the innately familiar touch of soft warm lips against her throat, fingers carefully pulling her rough spun scarf from her neck.

She knew those lips. She loved them and the man attached to them. What was not so familiar yet was the shockingly red growth of beard around those lips. Anders had not deemed it worthy to pack a razor. She had never seen him with so much hair. It tickled her, literally and figuratively, to no end.

A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, and she lay happily with her eyes closed as Anders scooted closer, pulling her body closer to his own with a large gloved hand.

She could feel him, the familiar broad heat and the shape of his bones, hips and shoulders and ribs. And cock. A particularly cold wind whipped through, and she opened her eyes. Jeorek was across the fire, turned away from them and curled into a large ball, his breathing even and deep.

She shivered and rolled, facing Anders and finding warmth on her face in the space between her and his chest. He smiled down at her, and she brought her hands up to cup his face. She wore gloves to sleep, and she felt the coarse hair of his beard through the fabric covering her palms.

She laughed.

“What?” he shook his head and dipped it low, “What is so bloody funny?”

The beard scraped her cheek and she shook, laughing in earnest, trying to stay quiet and not wake his brother.

“Oh… is it my beard?” he teased, holding her tighter against himself and rubbing his cheek against her like a bear scraping against the trunk of a tree, “Oh… that feels good, Marian.”

“Stop it!” she squeaked, tears gathering at the corners of her eyes which were warm now but would turn cold quickly. She squirmed trying to get loose from him, but damn him, he held her tight and continued rubbing. The _sound_ of the ridiculous red-beard made her laugh so hard she could hardly breathe now.

“You don’t think it suits me? It’s so manly.”

“Anders… _Teo_ … please!” she gasped, and he stopped, chuckling and bringing up one of his own gloved hands to wipe away the tear that had run into her hair. He licked the other tear from the side closest to him, his tongue hot against her cool face.

Her heart hammered in her chest and her breathing slowly started to even out, feeling safe and giddy in his arms, cradled and trapped as she was. He had wound his long legs between hers and flipped his blankets over her, and they were snug together inside the wool chrysalis.

“It’s very red,” she said, digging her fingers into it and scratching. His eyes closed and his jaw fall open and he all but purred. _He really is like a big hairy house cat_ , she thought then, as he nuzzled his furry face against her fingers.

“My mother has red hair,” he said, still with his eyes closed, “and blue eyes, like Jeorek’s. I… look like my father in all respects save the beard.”

“I’d never have known it.”

His eyes opened, dark brown and alert.

She kissed him softly, snuggling in, “Are you worried?”

“Bit late for that now if I was.”

“You could still be worried.”

“Are you worried?”

She thought for a moment and then kissed his chest over his heart, making a little non-committal sound in her throat, “Maybe a little. For you.”

He had followed Jeorek so easily. Or at least that’s how it seemed to her. He had been keeping secrets from her, or not telling her everything. It frustrated her. They had been lovers for nearly a year, but it was already becoming difficult for her to remember a time when they hadn’t been. Truthfully, they always had been… they had just never consummated it. The feeling, the attachment, the _need_ … that had always been there. Even in the years apart, in a way.

To have him, once again, start keeping things from her felt alien and unsettling.

 

“Why?”

His lips were against her forehead, his thumbs circling lightly against her back.

“Why what, Marian?”

“Why did you follow him? What did he say to you?”

He kissed her, lightly, from temple to temple and made his way down along the line of her faintly crooked nose. He took her mouth, and she gasped almost silently as the tip of his tongue tasted her, once, then again deeper. He let out a breath with a possessive growl behind it and rolled a little more on top of her, settling against her hips.

When he spoke, it was low and against her clavicle, the rasp of his beard no longer making her giggle but sending florid veins of need through her at the feeling of the roughness of him, the hard edges and the secrets, the parts of him that she had never known, not in more than twenty years together.

“I came here because I could,” his tongue was against the sensitive spot where her neck joined her shoulder. He bit her, hard enough to leave a mark on her white skin. She groaned, and felt him soothe the spot with the flat of his tongue, lazily, a cat lapping cream from a saucer.

She felt the pull of lust in her womb, her cunt clenching at the register in his voice, his care for the way he marked her as his. He did this, too, she understood, because he _could_.

There was a clumsily shifting of clothing beneath the blankets, removing only what was absolutely necessary, only that which really separated them. Their bodies smelled strongly but not unpleasantly. The smell of each other, sex and sweat, was heightened in the crisp cold night and by the whiskey, by the need to rut together quietly so as not to wake Jeorek. She felt rocks under her back, and the rough intrusion of Anders in her body, the cant of his hips and the angle of his cock low so that with every thrust, she felt him deep, re-entering and sliding along her, feeling him deep in her ass as well as her cunt.

His hair was loose and long, gold in the dying firelight and pale in the moonlight that served as the only light when the flames turned to embers.

He came deep inside of her, gasping wordlessly, the cords of his neck tight and beautiful as he thrust blindly, unevenly, and curled over her. Gloved hands held her face, and their hearts pounded against each other. He stayed inside, buried and tight against her, and they slept like that, as close to each other as they could ever be.

***

He didn’t know what to expect.

Over the rise of one last small hill, there were three structures.

Seeing them, he was ten years old again. Immediately. And he smelled smoke.

Jeorek was a blur of red hair and leather and wool as he sped by him, shouting roughly as he ran the final distance.

Hawke was at his side, her fingers lightly grazing his thigh, letting him know that she was there.

A blonde woman poked her head out of the door of one of the white round structures, revealing an intricate gem colored design on the interior of the door.

She smiled, a wide beautiful smile and ran out towards Jeorek.

Anders saw how she guarded the bundle tired around her shoulder, the round curve of the infant tied against the warmth of her body. He and Hawke watched silently as Jeorek took her face between his broad hands and kissed her, oblivious to anything else. Oblivious to the cold. Oblivious to the spectators he had brought with him. The wind whipped her skirt around her legs. She pressed her thumb against his chin, and said something that did not carry to their ears.

His eyes dropped to the bundle and she carefully shifted it, revealing the pink, puffy face of a sleeping infant. Long bodied but still small enough to look not quite human.

Anders felt something then, a strange instinctual pull. That child was a stranger to him, but it _was_ his blood. His family.

Jeorek took the baby from her, holding it with practiced ease, and wrapped the long end of his own scarf around the tiny body, shielding it from the wind.

He kissed his wife again, and turned to face the two of them.

“It’s a girl!! She’s a girl!”

The baby started at his shout, and began to cry. He patted her comfortably and motioned for them to come down.

“You ready for this?” Hawke asked him, squeezing his wrist.

He kissed her temple quickly in response and they walked down towards the little family side by side.

As they reached them, a boy with curly blonde hair so fair it was nearly white careened from around the edge of one of the structures.

“Papa!”

“Miko!” Jeorek knelt and scooped the boy up, holding him with one arm and the baby in the other, his pack still on his back. His kissed the boy’s cheek and laughed.

Jeorek’s wife made a tutting sound and took the baby back from him.

“Grazyna,” he said, and dark brown eyes looked back at him as she settled the baby back into the wrap, “This is Teodor. My brother.”

She looked at Anders, studying his face as if trying to decide if she agreed with Jeorek’s assessment. She smiled tightly, and extended one hand to Anders.

“And his woman, Hawke.”

She turned her gaze to Hawke.

“Marian. Or Hawke. Either is fine.”

Anders smiled, dipping his head. She was nervous.

“It’s good to meet you both,” Grazyna said, shaking Hawke’s hand and then scooping both arms under the weight of her baby.

“And this is Miko, my son,” Jeorek beamed, lifting the boy up higher.

Anders could hardly believe how much the boy looked like their father… and by the transitive property, he supposed, like himself.

“This is your Uncle Teodor,” he said to Miko, who shyly buried his face in his father’s neck.

“And this is Helena,” Grazyna said, patting the bundle, “Jeo, it is cold. Come inside and stop torturing these people.”

Jeorek clearly did not feel the cool, and Anders didn’t mind it much. Hawke, beside him, said nothing but her teeth chattered subtly.

Grazyna lead them inside the nearest structure. They each dropped off their dirty packs outside the door and scraped their boots on a roughly woven carpet outside. Inside, it was incredibly warm and homey. Dark and cave like, there was a little cooking fire in the center, it’s smoke rising out through a hole in the roof.

Jeorek kissed his wife again and reached for the baby before sitting down heavily in a large chair clearly his own as it perfectly accommodated his long legs.

“How is she?” he asked, offering the rooting baby his finger.

Grazyna looked at Anders and Hawke, tying her fair hair back into a loose knot, “Do you want tea? Food? I have a stew for dinner, but I can make you something in the meantime.”

“Tea would be… lovely,” he said. Everything was spoken in the Anders tongue, and he looked at Hawke who seemed to be frowning in concentration, keeping up but not without effort. She nodded in agreement a moment later and Grazyna busied herself pouring tea from a little blue kettle into cups.

Miko crawled into his father’s lap and showed him a wooden bird, held in his grubby hands.

“She is not well,” Grazyna said evenly. Anders noticed the bruises of exhaustion beneath her eyes. They were not talking about the baby, but rather his own mother… who must be nearby.

He felt angry at Jeorek then, seeing that he left this poor woman to tend for the farm, labor, then two children and his dying mother.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked, stepping forward and taking the cups from her before handing one to Hawke.

Grazyna stared at his hands. Jeorek, he noticed, did as well.

“You can’t…” he said, “That is… you shouldn’t do any of that. Here.”

“Any of what?” Anders asked incredulously, but he knew.

“You are a healer?” Grazyna asked, her voice very soft.

“Yes.”

“She thinks you are cursed. The best thing to hope for is that she thinks you are a shaman at least… doing good work. But, please, brother,” Jeorek cupped one hand on the back of his son’s head, “please don’t do any conjuring here.”

Anders swallowed hard, feeling suddenly trapped in the small dark room. He was very aware of the staff that he had strapped to his back.

Hawke sipped her tea behind him, a little too loudly.

“Please,” he saw fear in Grazyna’s eyes.

“I…” he shuddered imperceptibly, “I won’t. It seems foolish to me, if I can ease her pain--”

“Shall I take them to their chata, then? Surely you’ll want to change, and wash. She’ll want to see you soon,” Grazyna stepped closer to him and placed a small hand on Anders’ arm.

“Yes… of course.”

“Our… chata?” Hawke asked.

“Well you don’t want to stay here,” Jeorek said, shifting the baby, “what with a new baby waking up all night, right?  
And I thought you wouldn’t want to sleep in mother’s… no. So… yes. You have a place.”

Grazyna lead them out and across the field toward a smaller structure. It was, as he remembered, a chata. A round structure built from a latticework of wood and covered in layers of wool and canvas. They were meant to be easy to put up and take down, allowing herding families to travel, to be nomadic as needed.

Jeorek had constructed a chata for him before leaving. He felt a hard lump in his chest at the amount of faith his younger brother had placed in him and in the idea that he would return with him.

“The bed is small,” Grazyna said, apologetically, lighting a fire in the center of the room, “but long. Jeorek said you would be tall. But we didn’t know you would bring your wife.”

“Ahh,” Hawke looked at him sharply, but he shrugged.

“Thank you.”

She lit a lantern, “There is a tub. I can bring you hot water for a bath--”

“I can manage that,” he said, “this is… thank you. Go, see to Jeorek.”

She smiled at him, showing crooked teeth, and then at Hawke before bowing out and closing the door behind herself.

He looked at Hawke, who crossed and touched the bed, “Wife, huh?" she laughed, tiredly, "They did this for you.”

“I know.”

“What did they say… about magic?”

He touched the rim on the tub. It was small, not large enough for him to properly sit in, but Hawke would be able to comfortably.

“They’re afraid of it. They asked me not to do it. I agreed.”

She let out a derisive grunt, and folded her arms.

“They believe what they believe, Hawke.”

“So… you just can’t be who you really are here?”

He shrugged, “I can just be another version of me, I guess.”

“What’s a shaman?”

He laughed, “Do you want to take a bath, kid?”

“Fuck yes, I do,” she joined him at his side, looking into the empty tub.

He touched the side of it and it filled quickly with hot water, steaming delightfully.

“I thought you promised--”

“Well I’m not going to do it in front of them,” he smiled sadly, then focused on filling the tub the rest of the way.  
Hawke retrieved a wrapped bar of soap from her pack and took out a mostly clean pair of clothes.

“Join me?” she started pulling at the layers of muddy sweaty clothing.

“I can’t fit in there and you know it,” he grinned at her, “but I want to watch you.”

She leered at him and shimmied out of her leggings which were crunchy with grime, “You want to watch me!”

“Yes,” he sighed and sat on the edge of the bed, unlatching his boots, “I _fucking_ do.”

“Well, all right.” Nude, she walked past him and lowered herself into the small tub, moaning freely as the warm water welcomed her in.

***

Before dinner, they were taken to the third chata.

Jeorek lead them, carrying Miko on his hip. Grazyna was already inside, Helena settled as sleeping and as full as a drum on a little bed on the floor.

Hawke squinted in the smoky room. There was incense burning, as well as a cooking fire. It had that same suffocating feeling as the chantry. She coughed quietly, stepping into the room behind Anders. Jeorek closed the door behind them and stepped beside Anders. “Mother. It’s Jeorek.”

He spoke in Anders, and she was very aware of her status as an outsider. She considered stepping outside, but one look at Anders’ spine and she stayed. She hadn’t seen him this tense in years. He was still as stone, so still it looked painful.

“Wiem, kto to jest.”

“ _I know who it is._ ” Hawke’s brain manually translated the response from the bed. The voice was deep but feminine, smoky as the room itself. She could not see the speaker, buried under a pile of furs and blankets.

"Przyniosłem kogoś."

“ _I’ve brought someone._ ” Hawke translated during the long tense silence that follows this statement. She felt Anders, stiff and nearly vibrating with tension.

“Teodor?”

She felt the hairs on her arm raise, not merely from the sound of the woman’s voice, tender and harsh at the same time, but the faint wave of nervous magic rolling off of Anders unnoticed. It was something he did when he was a kid… harmless energy that had no other way of being released. He hadn’t done it in years.

"Tak. To mi, mamo ".

“ _Yes. It’s me, Mother._ ”

The woman in the bed materialized, rising with great effort. Grazyna was quickly there, pulling the blankets from her lap and taking her arm, stabilizing her. Anders did not move; he hardly breathed.

Together the two women come closer to him, the older woman shuffling and looking down at the floor. She was dressed in a long white shift embellished with red flowers, her white hair braided neatly and coiled at the base of her head.

Reaching him at last, Anders’ mother reached out with a knotted hand. Her skin looks like weathered paper, and she touched his bearded cheek lightly. Hawke saw him jerk back so slightly that no one else notices.

She was tall, though hunched with age and pain. She saw Anders’ hands twitch at his sides, the only part of him that moved. She knew that it went against every fiber of his healer being to see pain like that and _not_ attempt to stop it, ease it, _fix_ it. She thought she saw the faintest blue at his fingertips, but then his fists clench white and it is gone.

"Jesteś szamana. Dobrze czynicie z przekleństwem, Teodor? "

“Nie jestem przeklęty.”

"Jesteś.Przekleństwem naszej rodziny. Przykro mi, mój synu. Musiałbym cięcia grzech z serca gdybym mógł ... "

“And killed me in the process, you daft old bat.”

Hawke couldn’t follow the entirety of this exchange, but based off of the sarcastic bite of his response on Ferelden and the twitch in his shoulders, she can guess that it wasn’t friendly.

The old woman smiled sadly, feeling the rest of his face with light fingertips, "Jesteś tak jak twój ojciec."

“ _You are like your father._ ” Hawke realized then, feeling like an idiot, that the woman could not see. In the dark room, she had not seen that the woman’s eyes were milky and did not open all the way, shut but old scar tissue and weak musculature. She saw him with her fingertips only.

He exhaled, scoffing.

She pulled her hand away, folding it demurely against her chest, “And who is the woman?”

She asked in Anders, but Hawke understood, the work of translation happening quicker now that her brain felt less stupefied.

“She is the wife of Teodor,” Grazyna answered, looking at Hawke and smiling warmly.

“You are married?”

Hawke heared him swallow hard, and he nodded. He then realized she could not see him and said, “Yes.”

She reached past him for Hawke, who was unprepared for just how cold the woman’s fingers would be. Her face was seen then, in that fashion, deft fingertips feeling out bone and cheek and lips, brow and the bump in her nose. It was shocking, to be seen that way. She felt exposed.

Anders’ mother reached down and touched Hawke’s belly. At this, Hawke stepped back, letting out a surprised, “Hey!”

“Ona nie jest hodowli?”

“No!” Anders' voice faltered and stepped between them, casting a withering look at Hawke over his shoulder.

His mother sighed, waving her hand, then said “Ona jest bardzo ładny, twoja kobieta.”

Smoothing a hand over her clean clothes, Hawke gathered that whatever had been said, it had to do with the contents of her womb... or the lack there of.

***

“What happened to her eyes?” Hawke asked Grazyna, handing her the cutting board that bore her carefully minced onion.

Grazyna had pulled her with her back to the main chata to finish dinner. Jeorek had unceremoniously dumped Miko into Hawke’s arms, and she grappled with the long bodied child the entire walk over, unsure of his to hold him. The brothers had stayed with their mother, alone. Hawke hated leaving Anders there, tense as he clearly was.

The blonde woman was lovely. Soft and thin, she had that delicate feminine quality that Hawke herself had never possessed. She pushed the onions in with the flat of her hand and said, “A long time ago, there was a fire.”

“She lost her sight in a fire?”

She nodded, and considered her words carefully, trying to tell the story tactfully and use vocabulary that Hawke could follow with ease, “Before that, she painted faces. Beautiful art. My mother did, too. They were friends.”

“Faces?”

“On paper.”

Portraits. Anders’ mother painted portraits until a fire took her sight.

Hawke’s heart clenched as pieces slid into place, like gears of some terrible machine that couldn’t be disassembled.

“Was the fire…” she scratched her head, smelling onion on her fingers, “was it Teodor’s fire?”

Grazyna looked at her, their faces close, and while she did not say anything, she nodded quickly.

“Oh, fuck,” Hawke sighed, “he… he didn’t know.”

“What?”

“He didn’t know. He didn’t know she was blind. That he’d…” she shook her head, realizing she was speaking in Ferelden, a lock of black hair falling into her eyes.

Grazyna pushed it back, tucking it behind her ear, “He was a little boy, yes?”

Hawke nodded.

“She was not mad at him. She loved him.”

Hawke looked out the one small window, open now into the cold night, and saw the chata where Anders was still inside.

“He needs to see,” Grazyna said softly, in Ferelden, “needs to see her.”

Hawke nodded, and turned her attention back to dinner, just to keep her hands busy.

***

They ate dinner together in the main chata. Jeorek carried his mother from her chata and then carried her back when the meal was done. She had graciously tried a bit of Hawke's whiskey, tasting it with a pleased smile. As Jeorek departed with her held in his arms like a child, Anders slipped outside.

Hawke followed him, walking behind him as the long lean shadow of him headed away from the dwellings and their warm light. Beside a fence, she found him, his knees buckled beneath him.

“I did that,” he said quietly, knowing she was there without turning, “I did that to her.”

“It was an accident. You were--”

“I know.”

She hesitated, then went to him, touching the hot back of his neck with a curled hand, “I’m sorry.”

“So am I. She used to paint…” he swore and turned his face from her. The only sound was the even sound of bleating goats and the wind in the grass.

“She’s beautiful,” Hawke said finally.

“She looks _old_.”

“Mothers often do.”

He offered her a polite empty laugh at her attempt at levity, and ran his hands through his hair.

“What are we doing here, Marian?”

She sat in the damp grass beside him, facing in the opposite direction but with her side pressed against his. She could feel his heartbeat.

“Seeing.”

“It’s so bloody stupid,” he hand both fists in his hair, and the wind carried his words away from her, “they could have healed her, then. A healer could have _fixed_ the damage. She could have seen. But they were so sodding afraid of…” he sniffed, and she knew he was crying, “Do you know what she said to me? Before?”

“When?”

“You wouldn’t know the words. When we went inside. She said that I am cursed. ‘Curse of our family.’ She said she would have cut the sin from my heart if she could have. But she said it with such…. _love_.”

“What do you want to do, Anders?”

He sniffed again, and wiped at his face with his sleeve, “I mean… I _want_ to leave. That’s what I want to do. And go home. But… I want to go home. Not to Kirkwall.”

 _Lothering._

“We can’t go home, Anders,” she reached for his hand and rested her head on his arm, “not like it was.”

“But I have you,” he said, firmly.

“You do.”

He exhaled, “I guess we stay. We stay until the end?”

“Is that what you want?”

“I owe her that. I owe him that.”

“Jeorek?" The brother who had placed so much importance, so much faith in finding him and bringing them back together before the option to do so was gone forever, "Okay. That’s what we’ll do then.”

“Thank you, Marian,” he swallowed and turned, looking at her finally.

She kissed him, cupping his strange bearded jaw in her hands.

"Come to bed with me?" she asked.

" _Yes,_ " he answered, and he followed her where she lead him.


	6. Let Me Go Home

“I’m not going to shave it off, kid!” he laughed loudly and tried to roll away from her, pulling the sheets with him, “It keeps my face warm!”

She pounced on him, and the indelicate weight of her knocked the air out of him, “You look insane!”

“Who cares?”

“I do!”

“Oh, really?” he wrapped his arms around her and tried to reclaim some ground, but she refused to budge easily, pinning him under herself with surprising strength. He ran his hands up along her bare thighs instead. They were thicker now than when they’d arrived. Rounder. She was softer everywhere and while it seemed foreign to see her, and feel her, that way after only ever knowing her thin to the point of skinny and hard with lean muscle… but it suited her.

“Really,” she batted his hands away, “I remember when you were vain. What would that Anders think of you now?”

“He would think… who is that virile looking man with a luxurious and, ow! Admirable beard,” he finished, recoiling and laughing as she dug her fingers in against his ribs.

“Fine! Keep it. But let me trim it, at the very least. It’s scraggly and you look like a vagrant.”

“Maker forbid I have a scraggly beard in the wilderness,” he folded his hands across his chest and looked up at her, “What will the goats think of me?”

“You should be more concerned with what the woman who is kindly enough to fuck you on a regular basis thinks.”

“Fine.”

Grinning, she bounced off of him and crossed the chata to the little stand where the basin was kept. As she rummaged through the contents of the stand he watched her bend without any kind of censorship.

She wore his shirt, the sleeves rolled up, the hem floating around her upper thighs. The shirt covered her, but only just barely, and it took everything in him not to get out of bed and go to her, ruck up the hem and touch her, _taste_ her, bury his face in her...

Turning, she held a small straight blade in her hand, and her face was set in concentration.

The touching and tasting could wait then.

“Come sit over here,” she said, “It’s cold out of bed.”

He came to the fire and plopped down on a stool and looked up at her.

“Just a trim. No shaving, right?”

“Don’t you trust me, Teodor?”

“Hmm,” he said, feeling the warmth of her legs near his as she turned his head and started trimming the admittedly scraggly ends of the beard, “You know I do.”

She worked quickly, as if she had experience with male grooming.

She’d obviously never done it with him.

“Da kept his so pointy,” she said conversationally as she worked, and he wondered if she’d seen the unasked question on his face. “I used to peek into their room sometimes, when I was really little, and I’d watch her trim it for him. I liked watching his face…” she turned his jaw, “he just looked so peaceful and happy.”

“With a blade at his neck?”

“Yes, with a blade at his neck,” she replied tartly. He could smell the harsh laundry soap on her hands so close to his face. Her skin was red, knuckles raw and cracked. He knew that she didn’t appreciate being left behind while he went with Jeorek into the hills to tend to the herd. He hadn’t really seen her during the days much at all, leaving before dawn and returning in time to eat the dinner she and Grazyna had prepared before bathing and crawling into bed with her.

Unfortunately for Hawke, here being a woman meant that she was expected to stay and clean. And cook. Wash the laundry. And tend babies and the infirm. She was quick to point out that those were all the things that he normally did in Kirkwall while she was out killing, avenging and accumulating treasure.

He smiled under her hands.

“Just remember, though, that the blade was held at his throat by the woman he loved,” she smirked.

“Oh, I’ll remember.”

She dropped tufts of springy red hair into a pile on the floor, “Sometimes I’d watch him brush her hair, and braid it,” her tone had dropped, and he could hear the blush in it, “She had such long hair then. Do you remember it?”

“I do.”

“I always thought…” she shook her head, “When he brushed her hair, it was… I mean, I guess now I think it was sexy. But that’s…” she laughed, pausing to step back and look at his face from a distance, “That’s disgusting because they were my parents. But… aside from that. I felt like that was so private. I shouldn’t have looked. But I did. I couldn’t not look. Did I ever tell you about that?”

“No, you never did.”

“I haven’t thought about it for years.”

Her hair had grown longer since they left Kirkwall, the ends of it brushing her shoulders.

Shoulders that were now exposed to him as the over-large shirt fell open at the neck.

His eyes were drawn to the mark between her shoulder and her neck. A bite mark. Still red and starting to bruise left there the night before.

He’d been doing that more often since coming here, and harder, leaving marks that lasted longer. If the mark was still there the next time she stripped, it drove him _mad_ … Seeing it now, the shadow of his teeth, his mouth, on her flesh, he felt his belly tightening, remembering her mewling cry as he bit into the soft skin, marking her as he fucked her from behind like an animal. She had arched under him, her head dropping forward, keening his true name; she _loved_ it.

And so did he.

“That looks better,” she said brushing her fingers roughly through the beard that remained, loosing shorn hair. She caught his gaze, set on her face, seeing the flush in his cheeks.

“Stay right there,” he said, and stood, taking her brush from the table beside the bed.

“Teo…”

“Sit here,” he put his hand on the seat of the stool.

She sat with her back to him, smiling a sheepish smile he hadn’t seen for a long time.

He ran the brush through her silky black hair, carefully unraveling tangles, taking the time to rub circles into her scalp with the pads of his fingers. She moaned and bowed her head but didn’t speak.

Finished, he tossed the brush onto the bed and started gathering her hair into sections.

“It’s too short to braid,” she tried to turn.

He tugged lightly, “No it isn’t.”

His hands moved quickly, producing a neat soft plait against her head, tapering down against the nape of her neck, tied with a small strip of leather.

He kissed her there, at the nape, feeling the round hard bump of her vertebrae against his lips.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said softly.

“Where did you learn how to braid hair?”

“Wardens have more downtime than you’d think,” he chuckled, and scooped her up off the stool.

He felt stronger here. Thicker and broader. His life in Kirkwall was physical, but there was no fresh air. There was no open sky. There was not always a hearty meal guaranteed at the end of each day.

And, perhaps more than all of those things, there was a spirit that resided in him that made himself known in Kirkwall… but not here.

 _Not here_.

This place wasn’t perfect.

His mother was dying. Her pain left her unable to speak some days. And while he was here, in essence, for her.. he rarely saw her or spent much time alone with her. Emotions were stilted here. They always had been. It was not like this in Lothering, where the Hawke household seethed and churned with all the love and frustration and honesty... all the things they _felt_ for each other.

He felt for Jeorek who was now watching her fade with a lifetime of muffled affection between them. The man didn’t speak to him about it, not a word during the long days outdoors together.

He talked about goats. He talked about his children and, haltingly about sex, or about Grazyna and Hawke… but never about their mother. Or, for that matter, their father.

Marian knew, though, what that was like. To watch the slow decline of a parent who had always been a parent; she had done it with Malcolm.

Depositing her on the bed, he tugged down the neck of the shirt and nibbled, lightly, around the mark. His mark. Her hands twisted into his hair.

Despite the reason for their presence, this was the closest they had come to being normal. The kind of normal Malcolm had no doubt hoped for them, as his children, to find. It felt, sometimes, like they were play-acting at it. Gleefully playing characters that had not lived the lives they’d lived. In Kirkwall, they were Anders and Hawke… but here, they were Teodor and Marian, a man and wife, living with his family nearby. He tended goats with his brother and she… right now, tonight, she had that sweet powerful baby smell impregnated, secretly, on the flat plane of her collarbones from where his niece’s head had rested after dinner. They ended each day making love and sleeping the healthy deep sleep of the content and would rise in the morning to do it all again.

“Oh. Wait.”

She released her grasp on his reluctantly. He reached out of bed with a long arm and came back with a little pot of salve. He removed the lid and scooped out a dollop, warming it between his hands. Then he took her left hand between his own, massaging it into her dry, soap-cracked skin, and pressing in with his thumbs, easing the strain she felt in her wrists, the tired ache between the bones of her hand. He repeated the process on her right hand with the focused attention of a healer.

She watched him work, his skin tan and warm in the firelight.

He kissed the inside of each wrist.

“You know,” she said, drawing his eyes up to her face, “I hate doing laundry. And I’m still a fucking terrible cook, and I feel awful for Grazy, because she has to put up with me.”

He laughed and nuzzled against her wrist again, feeling her heartbeat against his cheek.

“She’s kind of amazing… how she gets everything done. Even with two babies and your mother--”

“And you.”

“Shut up!” she smirked and nudged him hard with her knee, “but yeah. Even with me,” she softened, bending forward to kiss him just above the knee, “I may never be domestic, but, I like who we are here.”

He ducked his head, his hair falling forward.

“I wish I saw you more,” she said, smoothing her hands up his thighs, “I miss dragging you through slums and sewers.”

“I can’t say I miss the sewers… I miss the other bit, too. But this? Being here with you, every night? In this bed? Not under constant threat of having our throats slit?” he nipped at her, lightly, between the wrist and thumb, “And did I mention how much I like being in bed with you?”

“You did mention that, yeah…” she nodded, her hands nearing the joint of his legs and hips. He exhaled, shuddering with pleasure as her thumbs pressed into the crease of his groin.

She cupped him, holding his balls with one hand and stroking his cock with the other, the warm salve on her letting her hand slide more easily against his skin.

“Oh, that feels good,” he sighed, his hands clenching in the sheets at his sides.

“What do you want, Teo?” she pumped him evenly, and he was hard and smooth and hot in her hands, “Tell me what you want tonight.”

“Your mouth. S-suck my cock.”

“Is that what you want?”

“ _Fuck_ , yes.”

She smiled against him. He felt her tongue, hot and wet, from the base to the tip.

“And then…?”

“I want to fuck you.”

“How?”

“Slow. On your side."

“Oh, yeah?” on a down stroke she took his head into the heat of her mouth, swirling her tongue around the exposed sensitive flesh.

“Yes. _Ahh_!”

She took him, all of him, holding his hips in place as he involuntarily started to buck up. _In_.

He understood, and willed himself to lie still. She pushed his legs further apart and lowered her mouth at her own pace, taking the head into her throat only when she was ready to do so. She had the control.

She stroked the skin behind his balls with two gentle fingertips and he groaned, opening his eyes and looking for her. To see her. The shape of her, then, soft rounded arms and thighs as she crouched between his legs, lips around him, eyes closed in concentration, hair pulled away from that beautiful, face… _Maker_ , to have lived long enough to be here!

He pressed a thumb against the bite mark and she moaned around him.

Maybe they weren’t really them.

Maybe this was a mirage… an illusion.

He knew that, though… and that made it all right to accept that this was nice, and they could be happy here, as long as it would last.


	7. Blinding.

They didn’t own much.

It was hard to have much of anything when you moved everything as often as they did. Or had, when Cecylia was stronger.

It was midday, and all five of them were in Cecylia’s chata. Helena was fussing in her mother’s arms while Miko napped content and smeared with honey and crumbs in a big chair. Cecylia was sound asleep. Hawke wasn’t entirely sure what it is in the spoonfuls that Grazyna gave the woman… but whatever it was, it eased her pain and let her sleep. And it smelled fuck-awful. She did know that much.

Grazyna had Helena against her shoulder and was tiredly bobbing and pacing around the room with her.

Hawke, at a loss at having nothing to do for once, had wandered over to the little stockpile of what seemed like junk, far from the bed and covered with an old quilt.

Marian Hawke was and always had been a curious creature. To a fault, maybe.

She lifted the corner of the quilt and gasped without meaning to.

A face. As real as one in the room with her. Light and bone and skin and… the face was so real she reached out and touched it.

This painted face that looked like Anders. But wasn’t him. Not at all. The eyes were all wrong. All wrong.

“Her portraits,” Grazyna said quietly, having come up behind her, “That is their father. Her husband.”

“Did you know him?” she had learned the language and now only struggled occasionally with tense.

“I did. Yes.”

“What was he like?”

She had asked Jeorek in Kirkwall, but he’d hardly given her an answer.

“He was… _cold_ ,” she said, shifting the baby to her other shoulder.

“Cold?”

It was hard to imagine… both of his sons were warm, to the extreme, often even when they didn’t wish to be.

Grazyna nodded, a few strands of cornsilk hair falling loose from the bun at the back of her head, “He was in mourning.”

“For who?”

Grazyna leveled her with a hard blue look.

“The son he lost.”

“Teodor?”

She nodded, then cast a look over her shoulder at Cecylia’s bed.

“He told everyone that his son had died in the fire. The same fire that blinded his wife.”

“Everyone?”

“The village.”

Hawke hesitated, but she had a hunch, “Did he tell Jeorek that his brother died?”

Grazyna nodded.

“Fuck.”

“What else could he say? If they asked what happened to his son? He never had a funeral for him… there was no body. Lost in the fire.”

Hawke thought that in that phrasing, it wasn’t entirely a lie.

“There are more. Portraits. These are only the ones she wanted to keep. The rest were all sold.”

Hawke carefully moved the portrait of Anders’ father out of the way, and looked at the next. Two boys. One blonde, much older boy with a red-haired baby sitting on the his knee. Both had serious, oddly adult expressions.

She couldn’t look away from Anders’ face.

This was who he was before. When he was this family’s son. Before he was a mage. Before her family.

Before he was _hers_.

Their matching ears were painted with such skill and care and she could see the light and the blood vessels in the delicate looking skin. She wanted nothing more than to feel Anders' ear with her fingers, pinching the fleshy part of the lobe as she often did to get a rise out of him.

They had never had their portraits done. She had no record of what she looked like as a child… or what any of the rest of her family looked like at all… save the one portrait of her mother, done before she left civilized society to live in Ferelden with an apostate who had loved the fuck out of her.

The portrait wasn’t a living thing at all.

But it was like a memory. Two sons painted by their mother, the way she saw them.

“I like that one very much,” Grazyna said, very softly, smiling against the round curve of her daughter’s head.

“Me too,” Hawke answered, but her voice came out thick and strange.


	8. Crossfire

It never really got hot on the steppe but the weather did turn warmer when it became something like spring.

The days were often quite lovely and the evenings gradually became more pleasant and less hostile. On the very first of the nights that it was comfortable to do so, they sat outside after dinner. All of them. Together.

His mother was swaddled and seated in a chair he and Jeorek had dragged from inside the big chata.

She was a beautiful woman, he saw that then, really saw her, with her hair neat and held in place with a shell comb. The firelight cast her pale face with warmth it no longer possessed, her body robbed of that flush by sickness.

Hawke had asked him what it was that was killing her. He knew, of course. He couldn't help but _know._ He had told her that she had growths, inside, in many places. Hawke had looked disturbed at that and asked, " _Where_?" He touched her to show - under both arms, in the hollow of her throat, in her groin, and finally between the eyes. Hawke had shied away from the last touch and not asked him about it again.

Her scarred eyes were closed, as always, but she smiled, genuinely, and stroked a thin hand through Miko’s pale curly hair. He sat at her feet, chattering excitedly like a magpie.

Jeorek stood, and Anders saw Grazyna’s face as she took him in; _open, pure adoration_.

He walked toward their chata, pausing to cup the back of her head in his large hand as he went.

Jeorek was twenty-five years old. A baby still. He had been two years old when Anders last saw him. _So small…_ Anders remembered a chubby baby intent on following him as he went about his chores on the farm, one who stumbled and fell, often, and would sit crying in the dirt until his brother would pick him up, begrudgingly, and console him.

Anders also remembered what he was like at twenty-five. Living at the Keep, fighting, traveling, fucking sometimes, often, indiscriminately… a very different life than that of his brother. Jeorek was the man in this family, and thus responsible for the protection and safety of everyone present.

This was his whole world… not demons and rebellions and conspiracy and murder, just the small scope of everything precious here.

Jeorek emerged from the chata, red hair bright in the firelight, with the curved wooden body of an instrument similar to, but not quite, a lute. He sat down beside Grazyna and started playing, his large blunt fingers moving with surprising dexterity. The tone of the instrument was warmer and rougher than a lute. He sang, too, with a coarse and metered cadence that was very much Jeorek.

Anders glanced across the fire at Hawke, who was watching Jeorek with an unguarded expression on her face, chin resting on her hands.

Feeling his gaze, her eyes shifted to him, and she smiled, full lips parting, and high round cheeks swelling like apples.

He was taken aback when the instrument was handed to him.

“You remember?” Jeorek asked, pulling his wife closer to him with one arm while Anders tentatively took the instrument.

“Uh… I’m not sure…”

“Try. See what you remember,” Jeorek said, his earnest face smooth and encouraging.

He plucked, meandering, and there was a peace in it that seemed familiar but distant… like a pleasant dream that he couldn’t fully remember upon waking.

Without realizing it, he started to play a song he’d learned in Ferelden.

It was one of Malcolm’s favorites. Played on nights much like this… the family sitting together after a meal but before bed.

Almost as subconsciously, and barely audibly, Hawke began humming along.

“ _…Girl, I've never loved one like you…_ ” he sang so quietly that the words caught in his throat.

She watched him intently, and hummed, keeping the rhythm he set, tapping the toe of her boot into the dry hard packed dirt.

“ _Ain't nothing please me more than you_ ,” she sang back at him, just as quietly.

He had never heard her sing before. She was a little off key. But honest.

It was the sweetest, most timid little noise, and it broke his heart.

He kept playing, and then sang the chorus alone. To her.

Her eyes were bright, lower lip held by her teeth. He heard her voice again, a little more loudly (and bravely, though just as off-key) as she smiled crookedly and sang the second chorus with him.

When he finished the song, Jeorek clapped him hard on the shoulder, and he remembered that it wasn’t just the two of them.

Far from it.

His entire bloody family was there.

Including Hawke. Beautiful, fierce, frustrating, tone deaf Hawke.

Jeorek took the instrument from him and started trying to figure out the new song on his own. He was a much better player than Anders.

Anders stood and went to her, offering her his hands.

She looked up at him as if her were mad, but finally caved in, letting him pull her to her feet and holding her close to himself.

They danced then, while Jeorek played her father’s favorite song. It was a song about home.

He realized that she had cried only after she had swiftly wiped the tear from her cheek.

“You should play and let them dance together,” she whispered to him, “look at how badly she wants to dance with him.”

Holding her close, head tucked under his chin, he glanced at Grazyna. The love and tenderness in the way she watched Jeorek, who seemed completely oblivious to the affection as he played with the tip on his tongue between his teeth. He chuckled, taking the moment to spin Marian away, a step from his body, where she twirled stiffly, giving him a withering look.

When they came back, he took the instrument and gestured to his younger brother to dance with his wife.

Hawke offered to hold Helena.

He tried to watch his brother and his wife dance. He tried. They were very cute, Grazyna absolutely tiny in Jeorek’s arms as she struggled to allow him to lead, stepping on his feet and laughing quietly, a sound like little silver bells. He smiled, and tried to keep his eyes on them.

But all he could see was Hawke, sitting by the fire and holding the beautiful little girl, firelight catching brightly in her soft blonde curls.

Something hot tore past his heart, into his lungs. She was so beautiful.

 _And that sight_ …

He _wanted_ that.

With her.

He wanted to take her to bed tonight and make a child with her, watch her body swell around it, he could protect her and shield her… he had delivered so many babies… he knew the risks inherent in the process, but he had the ability to keep her safe and healthy. He could deliver their child. He could do that, and be the first person to hold her. Or him. A daughter. Or a son.

But it couldn’t happen. Wouldn’t.

Not now. Not after so much time had passed. The Taint had taken that ability from him and many other things in exchange for an extra thirty years. Time bought at a high cost. It wasn’t a matter of hoping. She knew. They’d talked about it, of course, and she had expressed relief at not needing to take any precautions any longer. And even if he had been in any doubt, the very fact that she had used nothing to prevent a pregnancy in all the time they'd been together and nothing had happened confirmed it.

There was not a damn thing he or anyone else could do about it now.

What he saw there, in front of him; that was impossible.

That was a dream.

His throat felt hot and closed, and he was grateful to have the instrument in his hands. Grateful to have that to hide behind for the moment… until the moment passed.

Miko left Cecylia after explaining to her what was happening in a sweetly whispered narration and sat in front of Anders, cross-legged, watching his hands play with excessive intensity, brows furrowed.

When he finished the song, Jeorek and Grazyna came back to the fire.

Flushed and smiling, her hair in loose curls around her face, Grazyna collected her daughter from Hawke while Jeorek took the instrument back.

Miko crawled into Anders’ vacated lap and promptly fell asleep there, a heavy sweet tangle of limbs, smelling faintly of warm sugar and dirt.

Hawke watched him, as he patted his nephew’s back steadily.

He exhaled slowly, still feeling the thick strings against his fingertips.

Still feeling that hard burn in his chest.


	9. In The Sun

Something old and familiar trickled down the inside of Hawke’s spine.

Something deep and cold.

When she looked up from the basin full of wet linen, and saw Grazyna’s face drained of blood, she knew what that feeling was. Like an old friend.

 _Fight._

She looked over her shoulder as Grazyna began to scream, finding her voice reedy and thin.

The long silky body of the cat poured like mercury across the plain. Like a nightmare.

Hawke rolled, grabbing her bow and thinking that there was some kind of guidance, some gut instinct, in her insistence that she bring it outside with her today to tend to the wood, the string.

The weapon.

It felt right in her arms, in the muscles in her chest and back, core and legs... it felt right to nock the arrow and aim, as natural as breathing.

The cat, a mountain panther, a lion, had seen Miko… playing alone in the field.

She knew another hunter’s gaze when she saw it.

She understood.

But one blow, one arrow, shot as her heart beat evenly, and the cat was dead with hardly a sound.

Miko ran towards them, sobbing as loudly as his mother and just as incoherently.

Hawke left them and went to the body, blade in her hand. It was very still. Sleek. Dead.

It was a nursing mother, she noted, dropping to cut the animal’s throat out of an old habit of caution. Maybe that explains why she came for Miko rather than any of the goats.

Or… maybe Miko was less carefully guarded than the goats that had Anders and Jeorek looming nearby at all times.

 _It was you or them_ , she stroked the coat, and took back her arrow which had hit with admirable accuracy between the eyes, _And I chose them..._

Grazyna was clutching both of her children, her face red and wet, but she stood and came to Hawke’s side, the toe of her boot touching the spreading pool of blood.

“Thank you! Thank you, Marian!” her voice trembled over the wailing cries of both children, “Will you teach me to do that?”

Hawke smiled, holding her bow in one hand and her grandfather’s blade in the other.

“Of course.”

***

As Anders and Jeorek neared home, the sun was yet high enough that they each saw the pool of blood in the grass, fresh and dark and wide. It just looked so _wrong_ and set Anders' teeth on edge. Metallic.

“Marian!”

Jeorek made no sound as he darted from Anders’ side, running past abandoned laundry and overturned basins to his own chata.

Anders could neither hear or see any of them. They were not outside.

Everything looked abandoned, save the smoke of the fires. He dropped to one knee and pressed his fingertips in the blood. Still warm.

"Hawke!"

“Anders?!”

He turned, the smell of blood making him dizzy, and saw her, red hands raised.

He ran to her, calling out as his voice cracked, “Hawke!”

“Look, I killed a lion!”

“You… what?”

She had, indeed, killed a lion. And then had apparently set about skinning a lion, and butchering it.

“I thought… I’ve never eaten lion, have you?” she smiled, and he saw the Kirkwall Hawke again, a bloodied mad little beast. Some strange version of the Marian he had lived with so closely in Lothering... even a different version than the Marian who slept curled against his chest in the clinic. No, this was _Hawke_. Not Marian.

She had stretched the skin on a frame, clean and tidy. He touched the fur as she turned her back to him and he saw that his hands shook.

She was back down on the ground, beside the body, cutting into exposed wet muscles.

“Marian…”

She was sweaty and bloody with bits of nondescript gore, hair, fur and grass stuck to her skin and her clothes.

“Hawke!”

She looked up at him. He was pale.

“What?”

She wasn’t fazed by this. _Why was he_?

He dropped down beside her and took her face between his hands feeling the wide strength of her jaw bone, the beat of her pulse. He smelled like the mountain, but the scent was faint over the smell of the lion on her.

“Everyone is fine,” she said, really looking at him, “they’re all safe. They’re just scared.”

“Yeah? I can’t imagine why.”

She smirked, “I’m going to teach Grazyna to shoot. I want to make a bow for her, but, I don’t have--”

“We’ll get what you need.”

Her smirk softened, “Hey…” she bumped her forehead against his, “this is what I’m good at, remember?”

“I know.”

“I’m much better at getting bloodstains into my clothes than out of them.”

He laughed, feeling lightheaded, and kissed her forehead… one of the few patches on her face that was clean.

He stayed with her, helped her butcher the lion and wrap the meat. They were out there for hours. She seemed to be reveling in it, taking her time, exploring the anatomy of the animal. He was happy to just be there with, but was also begrudgingly found himself just as interested in her explorations as she was.

They dragged what remained on the animal, what she didn’t want, far from the chatas so that the scavenging animals that came following the smell wouldn’t be on their doorsteps.

Jeorek was there as they returned, carrying two large pails of steaming water. He set them down when he saw them coming.

He grabbed Hawke’s face and kissed her, once on each cheek and then finally, chastely on the mouth.

“You were meant to come here!” he said, his eyes red and his voice raw, hugging her tightly enough that she couldn’t quite catch her breath, “you saved my son’s life.”

She patted him roughly on the back as high as her arms could reach.

“A hawk with black feathers is a good omen,” he said, releasing her finally.

“I’m… happy to be a good omen!” she laughed, and noticed that she had gotten blood on his shirt where her face had pressed against him.

“The… water is for you to clean. Both of you. And I have a bath ready for you inside,” he kissed her dirty hands and let her go, then hugged Anders before picking up the wrapped meat and turning back, leaving them alone.

They washed the top layer of gore off there, outside, peeling of wet layers of clothing and dropping them in a pile outside the door to their chata before darting inside, naked and pale, cold as fish in night water.

A bath was indeed ready, with fresh blankets for drying on a chair beside the tub. The rest of the room had been tidied up as well, with clean sheets and a fresh thick quilt on the bed.

“Is… is our tub bigger?” she asked.

He laughed weakly, closing the door behind himself, “It’s his. Theirs. All you had to do around here to get a bigger bathtub was kill a lion.”

“Oh, just that…” she looked at him, over her bare shoulder, “please join me.”

He kissed her, nodding.

She eased into the water after him, settling between his legs and against his chest, moaning and pulling his long arms around herself like a blanket.

“I’ve killed bigger things than that and never gotten this kind of thanks for it,” she purred.

He pressed his cheek against the side of her wet head, “You saved their eldest son. Here… that means a lot,” he sighed, “That means everything to them.”

They were quiet then, comfortable to just stay close to each other, held in the warmth of the bath.

She felt him rumble beneath her back before she heard his voice.

“ _Lion Killer_.”

She smiled, and closed her eyes, leaning her head against the solid wall of his chest.

"When you found me today, you looked like you'd seen a ghost," she murmured.

"I guess I did, in a way."

"Whose ghost?"

"Yours. I forgot. I forgot that you..." he sighed, looking for the word.

"Kill."

"Hunt," he said, bringing a hand out of the water to pushing back her hair, "I thought you were hurt. With all that blood... maybe badly hurt. I haven't worried about that since we came here. I used to worry about it every day."

She was quiet, listening to him and watching the play of candle light on the wall.

"I just forgot. What that felt like."

"It'll be like that again," she said softly, "When we go back. All the things we worried about..."

"We?"

"I worry about you," she snapped, tensing in his arms, "Of course I do. You're not the only one who gets to worry."

She regretted saying it immediately, but he only kissed her head.

"I know."

She gripped his forearms where they crossed over her chest.

Something had been unsettled between them. She felt it and so did he.

The lion maybe have been killed, but it was still a harbinger of a life beyond this place, beyond this bath, that waited for them both. A life that couldn't be ignored forever.


End file.
